All posts tagged Big Data

Galvanize Inc., a venture-backed company that runs software-development education programs, has acquired Zipfian Academy, a data-science boot camp in San Francisco, according to Galvanize’s chief executive.

“Demand for data scientists and engineers is exploding,” said Ryan Orban, co-founder and CEO of Zipfian. “It’s largely driven by the fact that companies are dealing with more data than they’ve ever had to before.” Read More »

Intel Capital, the global investment arm of Intel Corp., has invested $62 million in 16 tech companies, part of a $355 million investment in startups that the chip giant expects to make this year.

The amount is similar to what Intel Capital has invested for the last two years and reflects Intel’s drive to find and participate in new technology that can help the company sell more chips. Read More »

Continuuity Inc., whose software makes it easier for developers to build applications that run on the big-data storage and analysis system Hadoop, has changed its name to Cask and will put its technology into open source. Read More »

Marketing automation software, which delivers sales prospects to customers, has generated some big companies– last year, Marketo Inc. went public and has a market cap of $1.26 billion, and HubSpot Inc. filed in August to raise up to $100 million in an IPO.

Radius Intelligence Inc. founder and Chief Executive Darian Shirazi thinks his company can do it better by taking a Big Data approach. The San Francisco-based company has raised another $54.7 million from Founders Fund and several other new and current investors, taking total funding to about $80.1 million. Read More »

Big-data analytics firm aWhere Inc. has raised $7 million in new Series A funding to help farmers cope with erratic weather and climate change.

The company combines public and proprietary data about weather, rainfall, soil quality, the pricing of a given crop or commodity and more. Its software-as-a-service then analyzes that data with proprietary algorithms to give users forecasts and reports to guide their business decisions. Read More »

What if software akin to the program that recognizes faces in Facebook photos could detect the cancer in an x-ray?

That’s the idea behind Enlitic, a new startup founded by Jeremy Howard. Howard is a heavy hitter in big data: He’s data strategist for Silicon Valley venture capital powerhouse Khosla Ventures and former president and chief scientist of Kaggle, which hosts big-brain predictive modeling competitions.

Enlitic aims to use advances in machine learning to make medical diagnoses. The company says it has partnered with hospitals and medical imaging companies – Howard won’t say which ones – to mine a host of data sources, including x-rays, lab results, handwritten doctors notes, and claims records. The company is building software algorithms that identify otherwise invisible patterns in these data sources, making for sharper diagnoses. Read More »

FarmLink LLC raised $40 million in Series B venture funding to help farmers use big data to maximize farm productivity and avoid spending unnecessary efforts on soil that’s already spent.

OpenAir Equity Partners led the investment joined by family office Thorndale Farm, Early Investments and individual investors John Rose and Don Walsworth.

About five years ago, FarmLink began as a subsidiary of MachineryLink Inc., which leases combines to farmers who don’t want the overhead expense of owning the rigs, as they typically only use them for 15% of the year or less, said Chief Executive Ron T. LeMay. Read More »

Even before launching its full-scale service that cranks out algorithms for use by data scientists, DataRobot Inc. has nabbed a $21 million Series A round at a $60 million pre-money valuation, Venture Capital Dispatch has learned.

“There’s a big supply-and-demand problem” in data science, said Chris Lynch, a partner at Atlas Venture, which provided seed capital to DataRobot last year. “One way to deal with it is to make data scientists more productive.” Read More »

About Venture Capital Dispatch

Produced by the editors of Dow Jones VentureWire, Venture Capital Dispatch tracks the fast-moving developments at the intersection of high-tech innovation and venture capital finance. Featuring the VentureWire reporting team in the Silicon Valley, New York, Boston and Shanghai tech centers, Venture Capital Dispatch provides insight into the newest start-ups and latest trends in venture capital investing. Write us at VCdispatch@dowjones.com. For more information on Dow Jones products covering venture capital and other financial markets, go to http://pevc.dowjones.com.